Billis Williams Gallery | 4/1-4/29 | Los Angeles, CA

Art Box

Richard Parker brings art objects and supplies to his first solo show at Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles.

Richard Parker doesn’t have to go far to find his subjects. Often they are right there with his art supplies.

“A lot of them are here, but you’d be surprised, some can be hard to find,” he says of the pencils, erasers and pastel sticks he uses as his still life models. “Sometimes I have to go searching for them. My brother-in-law gave me a Design Artgum eraser. They don’t make them anymore, so if you have one you might want to hold onto it.”DESiGN ARTGUM, oil on canvas, 30 x 40"Parker, who lives and teaches in Pasadena, California, will take his subjects and affix them to small white cards that are pinned to a wall. He’ll light them and then just start painting, often with the objects and shadows creating abstract forms of light and color that are immensely pleasing to the eye and to the imagined touch—viewers will likely recall the soft rubber of erasers and get a bit nostalgic. He also paints them quite large, often at 30 by 40 inches when the original objects are just several inches long.

BEST EVER 10CENT, oil on canvas, 30 x 40"

EBERHARD FABER Red Union 510, oil on canvas, 30 x 40"“I see them as large wall sculptures. Sometimes I even feel like a sculptor and not a painter,” he says.

The artist will be showing his newest pieces at a solo show opening April 1 at Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles. He was part of a three-artist show a year ago, and the gallery was extremely happy with his work and invited him back for a solo presentation.

“Richard Parker’s paintings are exquisitely rendered portraits of ephemeral objects more often used to create artworks than as the content. With a nod to Pop Art, Parker focuses on the most elementary of subjects: the very materials artists use to create their work—pencils, erasers and pastel sticks,” says gallery director Tressa Williams. “Parker balances the pristine with a touch of whimsy in his canvases—oversized and almost flawless in their depiction, Parker nonetheless includes the marks of hand sharpening on the pencils and of use in the pastels. Only the erasers are shown in their unused sublime perfection—speaking to that moment before the work begins and when all things feel possible. Defiantly simple and elegant, the paintings are formal in their geometry yet masterfull y playful in their content and scale.”